The author argues that involvement in the analysis and further methodological interpretation of modern literary texts requires identifi cation of their compositional, structuralsemantic and stylistic characteristics, discussing their cognitive supports, which defi ne techniques for working with them at language — native and foreign — teaching. Contemporary literature, created on the basis of memories, preserving the shape of the 20th century, has dissected the composition, refl ecting the process of memory, distant location in a single thematic relation of parts, updating them in semantic focus, as well as the use of precedent utterances associated with the characteristic features of the times described. In the article the demonstration of these theses is based on the material of E. Vodolazkin’novel "The Aviator".